This Quick Guide looks at effective online facilitation and its importance in online teaching and learning.
Specifically it unpacks the various interpretations of 'facilitation', the impact of online mediums on teacher and student roles, facilitation strategies, and emerging models and theories. The focus of this guide is on practical application and strategies associated with the facilitation of student learning.
This guide will be of relevance principally to teachers and learning support staff delivering courses or supporting students online, and designers of online teaching programs.
Team up for Specific Mid-Course Discussion and Build a Shared Experience
Team up your students for one short specific discussion so that a pair of your students can collaborate and discuss and explore a topic more intimately and personally. How might you do this? Create a set of 2-3 open-ended, related questions for the week and have each team of two (or three) learners select a topic to explore for 3-5 days. This results in a set of ongoing threads. Now select one of those threads for the entire class to respond and extend further. The goal is that the results of such a conversation thread contributes to the course knowledge and content.
Why do this? One of the more difficult behaviors to really cultivate in students is effectively responding to their peers' comments. From a student's perspective, it is more efficient and takes less time to just prepare one's own post, go in and do it and then exit the online classroom. So, we want to structure a learning task that requires students to respond, comment, analyze, the comments and responses of their peers.
In the three-stage model of building community (Brown, 2001) stage 2 of building community requires a feeling of "sharedness." Brown found that that feeling of having shared an experience in online classes often follows a " long, thoughtful, threaded discussion on a subject of importance after which participants felt both personal satisfaction and kinship."
It is this type of "long, thoughtful and reflective discussions" that we want to be striving to have our students participate in. And this often does take time. So being patient and providing time for exploration and even confusion is sometimes needed.
Tools for Online Engagement and Communication
PDF: Effective Online Facilitation
Website: 60+ Ecoaching Tips for Faculty Teaching Online
EXTRA CREDIT: Can Emotions Exist on the Internet?
Video: We Feel Fine